The 7th Ghost Story Read online

  “O my people, think not that I your Emperor, I your Father, seek your destruction. I desire only your happiness, your prosperity, your greatness; let not your folly provoke the severity of your Celestial Parent. Follow not after madness and blind rage; hearken rather to the wise words of my messenger.”

  “Hoo! hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo!” roared the people, gathering fury. “Hoo! hoo-oo-oo-oo!”—till the mountains rolled back the cry like the rolling of a typhoon; and once more the pealing of the gongs paralyzed voice and hearing. Then Tchin-King, looking at Hi-lié, saw that he laughed, and that the words of the letter would not again be listened to. Therefore he read on to the end without looking about him, resolved to perform his mission in so far as lay in his power. And having read all, he would have given the letter to Hi-lié; but Hi-lié would not extend his hand to take it. Therefore Tchin-King replaced it in his bosom, and folding his arms, looked Hi-lié calmly in the face, and waited. Again Hi-lié waved his gilded wand; and the roaring ceased, and the booming of the gongs, until nothing save the fluttering of the Dragon-banner could be heard. Then spake Hi-lié, with an evil smile,—

  “Tchin-King, O son of a dog! if thou dost not now take the oath of fealty, and bow thyself before me, and salute me with the salutation of Emperors,—even with the luh-kao, the triple prostration,—into that fire thou shalt be thrown.”

  But Tchin-King, turning his back upon the usurper, bowed himself a moment in worship to Heaven and Earth; and then rising suddenly, ere any man could lay hand upon him, he leaped into the towering flame, and stood there, with folded arms, like a God.

  Then Hi-lié leaped to his feet in amazement, and shouted to his men; and they snatched Tchin-King from the fire, and wrung the flames from his robes with their naked hands, and extolled him, and praised him to his face. And even Hi-lié himself descended from his seat, and spoke fair words to him, saying: “O Tchin-King, I see thou art indeed a brave man and true, and worthy of all honor; be seated among us, I pray thee, and partake of whatever it is in our power to bestow!”

  But Tchin-King, looking upon him unswervingly, replied in a voice clear as the voice of a great bell,—

  “Never, O Hi-lié, shall I accept aught from thy hand, save death, so long as thou shalt continue in the path of wrath and folly. And never shall it be said that Tchin-King sat him down among rebels and traitors, among murderers and robbers.”

  Then Hi-lié in sudden fury, smote him with his sword; and Tchin-King fell to the earth and died, striving even in his death to bow his head toward the South,—toward the place of the Emperor’s palace,—toward the presence of his beloved Master.

  * * * *

  Even at the same hour the Son of Heaven, alone in the inner chamber of his palace, became aware of a Shape prostrate before his feet; and when he spake, the Shape arose and stood before him, and he saw that it was Tchin-King. And the Emperor would have questioned him; yet ere he could question, the familiar voice spake, saying:

  “Son of Heaven, the mission confided to me I have performed; and thy command hath been accomplished to the extent of thy humble servant’s feeble power. But even now must I depart, that I may enter the service of another Master.”

  And looking, the Emperor perceived that the Golden Tigers upon the wall were visible through the form of Tchin-King; and a strange coldness, like a winter wind, passed through the chamber; and the figure faded out. Then the Emperor knew that the Master of whom his faithful servant had spoken was none other than the Master of Heaven.

  Also at the same hour the gray servant of Tchin-King’s house beheld him passing through the apartments, smiling as he was wont to smile when he saw that all things were as he desired. “Is it well with thee, my lord?” questioned the aged man. And a voice answered him: “It is well”; but the presence of Tchin-King had passed away before the answer came.

  * * * *

  So the armies of the Son of Heaven strove with the rebels. But the land was soaked with blood and blackened with fire; and the corpses of whole populations were carried by the rivers to feed the fishes of the sea; and still the war prevailed through many a long red year. Then came to aid the Son of Heaven the hordes that dwell in the desolations of the West and North,—horsemen born, a nation of wild archers, each mighty to bend a two-hundred-pound bow until the ears should meet. And as a whirlwind they came against rebellion, raining raven-feathered arrows in a storm of death; and they prevailed against Hi-lié and his people. Then those that survived destruction and defeat submitted, and promised allegiance; and once more was the law of righteousness restored. But Tchin-King had been dead for many summers.

  And the Son of Heaven sent word to his victorious generals that they should bring back with them the bones of his faithful servant, to be laid with honor in a mausoleum erected by imperial decree. So the generals of the Celestial and August sought after the nameless grave and found it, and had the earth taken up, and made ready to remove the coffin.

  But the coffin crumbled into dust before their eyes; for the worms had gnawed it, and the hungry earth had devoured its substance, leaving only a phantom shell that vanished at touch of the light. And lo! as it vanished, all beheld lying there the perfect form and features of the good Tchin-King. Corruption had not touched him, nor had the worms disturbed his rest, nor had the bloom of life departed from his face. And he seemed to dream only,—comely to see as upon the morning of his bridal, and smiling as the holy images smile, with eyelids closed, in the twilight of the great pagodas.

  Then spoke a priest, standing by the grave: “O my children, this is indeed a Sign from the Master of Heaven; in such wise do the Powers Celestial preserve them that are chosen to be numbered with the Immortals. Death may not prevail over them, neither may corruption come nigh them. Verily the blessed Tchin-King hath taken his place among the divinities of Heaven!”

  Then they bore Tchin-King back to his native place, and laid him with highest honors in the mausoleum which the Emperor had commanded; and there he sleeps, incorruptible forever, arrayed in his robes of state. Upon his tomb are sculptured the emblems of his greatness and his wisdom and his virtue, and the signs of his office, and the Four Precious Things: and the monsters which are holy symbols mount giant guard in stone about it; and the weird Dogs of Fo keep watch before it, as before the temples of the gods.

  THE SPECTRE OF TAPPINGTON, by Thomas Ingoldsby

  Originally published in Ingoldsby’s Legends (1840).

  “It is very odd, though; what can have become of them?” said Charles Seaforth, as he peeped under the valance of an old-fashioned bedstead, in an old-fashioned apartment of a still more old-fashioned manor-house; “’tis confoundedly odd, and I can’t make it out at all. Why, Barney, where are they?—and where the devil are you?”

  No answer was returned to this appeal; and the lieutenant, who was, in the main, a reasonable person,—at least as reasonable a person as any young gentleman of twenty-two in “the service” can fairly be expected to be,—cooled when he reflected that his servant could scarcely reply extempore to a summons which it was impossible he should hear.

  An application to the bell was the considerate result; and the footsteps of as tight a lad as ever put pipe-clay to belt sounded along the gallery.

  “Come in!” said his master.—An ineffectual attempt upon the door reminded Mr Seaforth that he had locked himself in.—“By Heaven! this is the oddest thing of all,” said he, as he turned the key and admitted Mr Maguire into his dormitory.

  “Barney, where are my pantaloons?”

  “Is it the breeches?” asked the valet, casting an inquiring eye round the apartment;—“is it the breeches, sir?”

  “Yes; what have you done with them?”

  “Sure then your honour had them on when you went to bed, and it’s hereabout they’ll be, I’ll be bail;” and Barney lifted a fashionable tunic from a cane-backed arm-chair, proceeding in his examination. But the search was vain: the
re was the tunic aforesaid,—there was a smart-looking kerseymere waistcoat; but the most important article of all in a gentleman’s wardrobe was still wanting.

  “Where can they be?” asked the master, with a strong accent on the auxiliary verb.

  “Sorrow a know I knows,” said the man.

  “It must have been the devil, then, after all, who has been here and carried them off!” cried-Seaforth, staring full into Barney’s face.

  Mr Maguire was not devoid of the superstition of his countrymen, still he looked as if he did not quite subscribe to the sequitur.

  His master read incredulity in his countenance. “Why, I tell you, Barney, I put them there, on that arm-chair, when I got into bed; and, by Heaven! I distinctly saw the ghost of the old fellow they told me of, come in at midnight, put on my pantaloons, and walk away with them.

  “May be so,” was the cautious reply.

  “I thought, of course, it was a dream; but then,—where the devil are the breeches?”

  The question was more easily asked than answered. Barney renewed his search, while the lieutenant folded his arms, and, leaning against the toilet, sunk into a reverie.

  “After all, it must be some trick of my laughter-loving cousins,” said Seaforth.

  “Ah! then, the ladies!” chimed in Mr Maguire, though the observation was not addressed to him; “and will it be Miss Caroline, or Miss Fanny, that’s stole your honour’s things?”

  “I hardly know what to think of it,” pursued the bereaved lieutenant, still speaking in soliloquy, with his eye resting dubiously on the chamber-door. “I locked myself in, that’s certain; and—but there must be some other entrance to the room—pooh! I remember—the private staircase; how could I be such a fool?” and he crossed the chamber to where a low oaken doorcase was dimly visible in a distant corner. He paused before it. Nothing now interfered to screen it from observation; but it bore tokens of having been at some earlier period concealed by tapestry, remains of which yet clothed the walls on either side the portal.

  “This way they must have:come,” said Seaforth; “I wish with all my heart I had caught them!”

  “Och! the kittens!” sighed Mr Barney Maguire.

  But the mystery was yet as far from being solved as before. True, there was the “other door;” but then that, too, on examination, was even more firmly-secured than the one which opened on the gallery,—two heavy bolts on the inside effectually prevented any coup de main on the lieutenant’s bivouac from that quarter. He was more puzzled than ever; nor did the minutest inspection of the walls and floor throw any light upon the subject! one thing only was clear,—the breeches were gone! “It is very singular,” said the lieutenant.

  * * * *

  Tappington (generally called Tapton) Everard is an antiquated but commodious manor-house in the eastern division of the county of Kent. A former proprietor had been High-sheriff in the days of Elizabeth, and many a dark and dismal tradition was yet extant of the licentiousness of his life, and the enormity of his offences. The Glen, which the keeper’s daughter was seen to enter, but never known to quit, still frowns darkly as of yore; while an ineradicable bloodstain on the oaken stair yet bids defiance to the united energies of soap and sand. But it is with one particular apartment that a deed of more especial atrocity is said to be connected. A stranger guest—so runs the legend—arrived unexpectedly at the mansion of the “Bad Sir Giles.” They met in apparent friendship; but the ill-concealed scowl on their master’s brow told the domestics that the visit was not a welcome one; the banquet, however, was not spared; the wine-cup circulated freely,—too freely, perhaps,—for sounds of discord at length reached the ears of even the excluded serving-men as they were doing their best to imitate their betters in the lower hall. Alarmed, some of them ventured to approach the parlour; one, an old and favoured retainer of the house, went so far as to break in upon his master’s privacy. Sir Giles, already high in oath, fiercely enjoined his absence, and he retired; not, however, before he had distinctly heard from the stranger’s lips a menace that “There was that within his pocket which could disprove the knight’s right to issue that or any other command within the walls of Tapton.”

  The intrusion, though momentary, seemed to have produced a beneficial effect; the voices of the disputants fell, and the conversation was carried on thenceforth in a more subdued tone, till, as evening closed in, the domestics, when summoned to attend with lights, found not only cordiality restored, but that a still deeper carouse was meditated. Fresh stoups, and from the choicest bins, were produced; nor was it till at a late, or rather early hour, that the revellers sought their chambers.

  The one allotted to the stranger occupied the first floor of the eastern angle of the building, and had once been the favourite apartment of Sir Giles himself. Scandal-ascribed this preference to the facility which a private staircase, communicating with the grounds, had afforded him, in the old knight’s time, of following his wicked courses unchecked by parental observation; a consideration which ceased to be of weight when the death of his father left him uncontrolled master of his estate and actions. From that period Sir Giles had established himself in what were called the “state apartments;” and the “oaken chamber” was rarely tenanted, save on occasions of extraordinary festivity, or when the yule log drew an unusually large accession of guests around the Christmas hearth.

  On this eventful night it was prepared for the unknown visitor, who sought his couch heated and inflamed from his midnight orgies, and in the morning was found in his bed a swollen and blackened corpse. No marks of violence appeared upon the body; but the livid hue of the lips, and certain dark-coloured spots visible on the skin, aroused suspicions which those who entertained them were too timid to express. Apoplexy, induced by the excesses of the preceding night, Sir Giles’s confidential leech pronounced to be the cause of his sudden dissolution; the body was buried in peace; and though some shook their heads as they witnessed the haste with which the funeral rites were hurried on, none ventured to murmur. Other events arose to distract the attention of the retainers; men’s minds became occupied by the stirring politics of the day, while the near approach of that formidable armada, so vainly arrogating to itself a title which the very elements joined with human valour to disprove, soon interfered to weaken, if not obliterate, all remembrance of the nameless stranger who had died within the walls of Tapton Everard.

  Years rolled on: the “Bad Sir Giles” had—himself long since gone to his account, the last, as it was believed, of his immediate line; though a few of the older tenants were sometimes heard to speak of an elder brother, who had disappeared in early life, and never inherited the estate. Rumours, too, of his having left a son in foreign lands were at one time rife: but they died away, nothing occurring to support them: the property passed unchallenged to a collateral branch of the family, and the secret, if secret there were, was buried in Denton churchyard, in the lonely grave of the mysterious stranger. One circumstance alone occurred, after a long-intervening period, to revive the memory of these transactions. Some workmen employed in grubbing an old plantation, for the purpose of raising on it site a modern shrubbery, dug up, in the execution of their task, the mill-dewed remnants of what seemed to have been once a garment. On more minute inspection, enough remained of silken slashes and a coarse embroidery to identify the relics as having once formed part of a pair of trunk hose; while a few papers which fell from them, altogether illegible from damp and age, were by the unlearned rustics conveyed to the then owner of the estate.

  Whether the squire was more successful in deciphering them was never known; he certainly never alluded to their contents; and little would have been thought of the matter but for the inconvenient memory of one old woman, who declared she heard her grandfather say that when the “stranger guest” was poisoned, though all the rest of his clothes were there, his breeches, the supposed repository of the supposed documents, could never be found. The maste
r of Tapton Everard smiled when he heard Dame Jones’s hint of deeds which might impeach the validity of his own title in favour of some unknown descendant of some unknown heir; and the story was rarely alluded to, save by one or two miracle-mongers, who had heard that others had seen the ghost of old Sir Giles, in his night-cap, issue from the postern, enter the adjoining copse, and wring his shadowy hands in agony, as he seemed to search vainly for something hidden among the evergreens. The stranger’s death-room had, of course, been occasionally haunted from the time of his decease; but the periods of visitation had latterly became very rare,—even Mrs Botherby, the house-keeper, being forced to admit that, during her long sojourn at the manor, she had never “met with anything worse than herself;” though, as the old lady afterwards added upon more mature reflection, “I must say I think I saw the devil once.”

  Such was the legend attached to Tapton Everard, and such the story which the lively Caroline Ingoldsby detailed to her equally mercurial cousin Charles Seaforth, lieutenant in the Hon. East India Company’s second regiment of Bombay Fencibles, as arm-in-arm they promenaded a gallery decked with some dozen grim-looking ancestral portraits, and, among others, with that of the redoubted Sir Giles himself. The gallant commander had that very morning paid his first visit to the house of his maternal uncle, after an absence of several years passed with his regiment on the arid plains of Hindostan, whence he was now returned on a three years’ furlough. He had gone out a boy, he—returned a man, but the impression made upon his youthful fancy by his favourite cousin remained unimpaired, and to Tapton he directed his steps, even before he sought the home of his widowed mother,—comforting himself in this breach of filial decorum by the reflection that, as the manor was so little out of his way, it would be unkind to pass, as it were, the door of his relatives without just looking in for a few hours.